Vatican seeks to reassure Jews on Good Friday prayer

The Vatican tried to reassure Jews on Friday that a new prayer that some see as a call for their conversion, did not indicate a change in the Church's high regard for Jews or its contempt for anti-Semitism.

But some Jewish groups said the Vatican did not go far enough to allay their concerns.

The Anti-Defamation League said it was still troubling the Vatican did not "specifically say that the Catholic Church is opposed to proselytising Jews" and accused the Vatican of taking "two steps forward and three steps backward".

A statement which Vatican sources said Pope Benedict had approved and partly drafted stressed that the new prayer used in some Good Friday services "in no way intends to indicate a change in the Catholic Church's regard for the Jews."

Catholic and Jewish sources said the statement had been delivered to the secretariat of the chief rabbinate of Israel.

The Vatican had been keen to try to defuse the controversy with Jews over the Good Friday prayer before Pope Benedict's first trip to the United States as pontiff later this month.

The German pope will meet American Jewish leaders and make a brief visit to the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan.

In February the Vatican revised a contested Latin prayer used by traditionalist Catholics on Good Friday, the day marking Jesus Christ's crucifixion, removing a reference to Jewish "blindness" over Christ and deleting a phrase asking God to "remove the veil from their hearts".

Jews criticised the new version because it still says they should recognise Jesus Christ as the saviour of all men. It asks that "all Israel may be saved" and Jews said it kept an underlying call to conversion that they had wanted removed.

Friday's Vatican statement said the Church's relations with Jews were still based on the landmark 1965 Second Vatican Council statement Nostra Aetate, which repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and began dialogue.

"Nostra Aetate presents the fundamental principles which have sustained and today continue to sustain the bonds of esteem, dialogue, love, solidarity and collaboration between Catholics and Jews," the statement said.

The Church "rejects every attitude of contempt or discrimination against Jews, firmly repudiating any kind of anti-Semitism", it added.

Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC) and a leading Jewish interlocutor with the Vatican, also said he had hoped for an explicit renunciation of proselytism.

"It is implicit in the statement that esteem and solidarity imply that proselytism is inappropriate but I would have been happier if this had been said explicitly," Rosen, who is based in Jerusalem, told Reuters.